The Body Stealers

Eats Chutes and Leaves

The Body Stealers
Directed by Gerry Levy
Tigon 1969
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so this makes two badly made Tigon production films I’ve seen in one weekend but, in the case of this particular dud, unlike The Blood Beast Terror (reviewed here), The Body Stealers is at least a very interesting one… because all the parts seem so mismatched.

The story sees a few batches of military skydivers on test jumps, hurling themselves from their planes but... with only their chutes landing on the ground (some of which are mysteriously stolen later in the story). General Armstrong, played by George Sanders gets his right hand man, played by Neil Connery (brother of Sean), to get some kind of army specialist out of retirement (for no apparent reason) to investigate just what is going on.

Enter said specialist, ‘beyond womanising’ Bob Megan, played by rugged Patrick Allen. He is aided and abetted by two doctors played by Hilary Heath and Maurice Evans (that’s Dr. Zaius to you, apes fans!) but… what has the strange girl on the nearby beach, Lorna, played by the ravishing Pamela Conway, got to do with everything. As she and Bob get over friendly and naked on the beach, the audience has to ask themselves, is she a space maiden who has something to do with the missing jumpers? Well yeah, probably.

And the tone of this one is all over the place. The opening credits where jumpers are being abducted is scored by Reg Tilsley with some romping title music which is totally inappropriate to the visuals and, I have to say, the music continues in this fashion throughout the film. Some of the minor dramatic moments are underscored… or really overscored… with piercing stingers so strident that I think even John Barry himself would have been given pause to rethink before jotting them down. There’s even a moment in the score which sounds exactly like the opening of Holst’s Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity, at one point.

And then there’s the two nude scenes with the truly stunning Pamela Conway. They feel completely out of place, especially the extended sex scene on the beach where the awkward actors have crashing waves superimposed over them. This and the music looks like it’s trying desperately to capture a teenage market by tacking stuff onto a film which has none of the trappings of the youth culture in its make up, aside from these elements.

And not only does it have no real appeal for that segment of the market, it clearly has no budget either. The aliens are just humanoids and, well, their spaceship is cloaked so you can’t see it. Except in one sequence where it features in two shots and… well I don’t know how Tigon got their hands on the model but it’s clearly the Dalek starship from the earlier Amicus/Aaru production Daleks Invasion Of Earth 2150AD (reviewed here). I mean, really, how did this happen?

So what more can I say about The Body Stealers? Is it a good movie? No, it’s terrible. As was the case of The Blood Beast Terror, I feel Hammer or Amicus would have made a much better movie out of this one. Could I recommend it to anyone… well no, not in all conscience. But, I did enjoy 88 Films Blu Ray transfer of the film from a lovely print and I’ll certainly be watching this one again if time and mortality permit.

The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy

Don’t Panic

The Hitch Hikers Guide
To The Galaxy
UK 1981
Airdate: Jan 5th to Feb 9th - Six Episodes
Blu Ray Zone 2

“Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
The Book

This is the story of a book. 

The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy to be precise. 

And I first heard the original radio show in the late seventies when it was broadcast... followed by an equally brilliant second series a year or so later. And, up to a time, there wasn’t any format of this which I didn’t love. Because, frankly, all but one of the adaptations of it skew close to the spirit of the writing and are obviously rendered with love. The only fly in the ointment being the 2005, big screen movie version which, somehow (and I thought the writing had made it future proof) was well cast but turned out to be an absolute abomination, capturing exactly none of the essence of the original tales and basically wasting the one shot it had at a cinema audience. It was just terrible. 

No, the radio show’s true legacy of really great Hitch Hikers products you can explore, including this TV series, was many. For example, I saw a wonderful and very loud version of it done on stage at what was then the Rainbow Theatre at Finsbury Park in the late 1970s. It was awesome. As was the slightly recast vinyl records put out by the BBC, hot on the heels of the radio show. And, of course, there were Douglas Adams original novels, starting out as an expansion on his radio scripts before taking us all on totally new adventures. Heck, I even had a can of everything, which was a rare promotional item given to book stores to tie in with the third novel, Life, The Universe And Everything.

Now, I was definitely sceptical about the validity of a TV show when it aired on the BBC in 1981, because I soon realised that, while most of the cast were ported over from the radio show and were able to say their lines with the exact same tone and delivery as that show and the record set, one very important main cast member was completely different. 

So we had the great Peter Jones as the voice of the book itself. The unrelated Simon Jones as Earth man Arthur Dent, Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox, Sandra Dickinson as Trillian, Stephen Moore as Marvin The Paranoid Android and even the great Richard Vernon as planet designer Slartibartfast. Heck, even the late, great Douglas Adams himself turned up in cameos in a few of the episodes. But, in the important role of Ford Prefect, Arthur’s friend who he soon discovers to be, not from Guilford after all but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse... the radio show and record set’s Geoffrey McGivern was recast and played by David Dixon. And, yes, it took me a little longer to get used to the slightly softer approach to Ford by this new actor but, he more than made up for it in body language and sheer enthusiasm, I believe. 

For those who are somehow still unfamiliar with the story, it follows the adventures of Arthur, Ford, Zaphod, Trillian and Marvin after Arthur and Trillian’s home planet of Earth is unexpectedly demolished by a Vogon Constructor Fleet, to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. Cue many far fetched and totally hilarious adventures around the galaxy involving such elements as the starship Heart Of Gold (with its Infinite Improbability Drive), dolphins, mice, giant super computers, a restaurant at the end of the universe, prehistoric man with a bunch of telephone sanitisers, a bowl of petunias and a very surprised sperm whale. 

And it was great as a radio show (the first two series made when the writer was still alive, at any rate) and it was pretty good as a TV show too. The electronic book is brought alive simultaneously as Peter Jones voice with, complex ‘computer animations’ giving us auxiliary facts and figures to what was being said. Well... I say computer animations... back in 1981 these certainly looked like high tech computer rendering but, just like Disney’s Tron, they were of course just hand rendered animations made to look like what the general public thought computer aided graphics probably should look like, I would imagine. It doesn’t detract from the visuals in any way, though and, the drawings and typography add to the fun, for sure. 

And I wanted to flag that the TV version of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, which is now to be found in a wonderful Blu Ray, three disc set (two whole discs of extras which I don’t have time to watch right now) because it was a great experience then and it’s a great experience now. And I would certainly recommend to my readers, if you are unfamiliar with Adam’s greatest literary creation, that you hunt it down in, preferably, its radio form first  (I’m assuming the CDs are still available nowadays) as it’s one of the all time greats. Just don’t... you know... watch the movie version. That was obviously put together by suits who just didn’t know where their towels* were. 

*Seek out the books, radio show or TV show for an explanation of that reference. Delve deeper! Enjoy the fjords!

The Dead Pool

Harry’s Game

The Dead Pool
Directed by Buddy Van Horn
USA 1988
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers. 

I first saw the movie The Dead Pool on its original cinema release in the UK in 1989, slightly behind the US theatrical release. I really liked the Dirty Harry films by this point but... I really hated this one... at the time. I thought the robot car bomb chase was stupid (while now, when we’re living in an age of killer drones... well, it just seems quaint) and I thought the background of the horror movie production setting was too theatrical and colourful... which admittedly it is but, I’m way more forgiving now, it would seem.

Revisiting the movie, well I actually really enjoyed it this time around and, although it’s still my least favourite of Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Dirty Harry Callahan movies, I think it’s not actually letting the spirit of the other movies down... it’s just how it seemed to me at the time of its release.

Following on from the most boring opening title credits of any of the movies in the franchise, we get a story where Callahan is actually being lionised by the press for what is seen as a heroic deed. Running with it, the San Fransisco Police Department, who are unused to having Callahan being received in a positive light, want Harry to cooperate with the press, this time in the form of lovely lady journalist Samantha Walker, played here by the great Patricia Clarkson. She has good chemistry with Eastwood in this and, I think this may be the first time I saw her in anything. 

However, she picked a bad time to be associating with Harry Callahan because various killers of a jailed mob boss are after his blood and, on top of that, the latest case revolving around a horror film production, with a truly unlikeable incarnation of Liam Neeson as the young, luvvie director, involves a dead pool with Harry’s name on it.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of a dead pool, lots of places have them (or at least had them back in the day). You would basically bet on which celebrity would be the first to die and, after a number of years, if your one came up next, you would win the pool of cash for the bet. In this one, a killer close to the production of the film is mowing his way through the list in order to frame the director and it’s Callahan’s job to find him. 

Once again we have a fast paced story with a number of action scenes and also some great police procedural stuff thrown into the mix... and Harry ‘gets the gal’ too, by the end of the movie (I was betting that both her and Harry’s new partner, played by Evan C. Kim, wouldn’t make it to the closing credits alive). It’s also got a less bold but still nicely put together score by the franchise’s regular composer Lalo Schifrin, with a few nice call backs to a couple of his themes from the first movie (reviewed here). 

Oh, and one James Carrey... that’s Jim Carrey to you and I... plays one of the early victims, a rock star whose death is made to look like a drug overdose by the killer, who completely fails at that cover up too. Another thing worth noticing is that the movie critic who is stabbed to death by the killer is made up to look like legendary film critic Pauline Kael (who was quite critical of the first movie in the franchise). 

And that’s all I’ve got on The Dead Pool, I think. It looks nice enough but the cinematography and set dressing makes it feel more dated and mired in the 1980s, unlike the other four which seem to be somewhat timeless. I thought it was fine though and I’m certainly more into it than I was as a 21 year old, that’s for sure. It’s as shame this was the final one but at least Callahan walks off at the end with Patricia Clarkson, so it’s nice to think that was a long and happy partnership for the characters in their fictional life beyond the screen. Not as much of a dud as I’d originally thought and Mr. Eastwood does a fine job with it.